244 Gitte Kristiansen
buted to Germany, France, England and Mexico by a total of 7 out of 50
listeners. In the case of the 8-9 year-olds, there is no doubt at all about the
condition of nativeness: see Table 11. If 100 percent of the 8-9 year-olds
knew who spoke with a peninsular accent and who were foreign, the impli-
cations for social stereotyping and processes of social exclusion (cf. Pur-
nell, Idsardi and Baugh 1999) are obvious, even in young children. The
results for the 12-13 year-olds were as in Table 12. One out of 50 children
took the peninsular Spanish speaker to be Argentinean, but the remaining
49 correctly identified the accent as peninsular Spanish. There can thus be
little doubt about the degree of awareness of lectal variation at the most
fundamental level: children soon know when someone speaks with a for-
eign accent and when not.
How, then, were the near-native accents evaluated? In the case of Ar-
gentina, the results were as in Table 13. 18 out of 50 of the youngest iden-
tifiers managed to correctly locate this accent as Argentinean, but as many
as 12 incorrectly identified it as a British English accent. In the case of the
8-9 year-olds (Table 14), the success rate increased by almost 50 percent.
In the case of the 12-13 year-olds (Table 15), the results show an even
higher degree of precision. Only two children out of 50 attributed the Ar-
gentinean accent to other identities (French and Mexican, respectively).
Further, how did the L2 accents fare on a fine-grained basis in compari-
son with the native accents? One would expect an accent so well-known
amongst youngsters as American English (due to the influence of pop
songs, popular TV series etc) to be readily identified as such. However (see
section 4 for a discussion) this was far from the case: see Table 16. The
confusion is generalized: the youngest children attribute the American ac-
cent almost randomly to all sorts of varieties, with their native peninsular
Spanish, England and Germany as minor exceptions. Not even by adding
the results of England to those of the USA (both being subcategories of
English) do the correct results surpass the scores of France.
The 8-9 year-olds fared only slightly better. If adding the scores for the
USA and England one obtains a percentage of correct results of 30 percent
- but even so the scores for France and Argentina together sum up 40 per-
cent of the (in these cases incorrect) evaluations: see Table 17. In the case
of the 12-13 year-olds the percentage of English accents, however, is
doubled. 60 percent of the adolescents now identify the accent as foreign
and the language behind the accent as English. Whether the accent is Amer-
ican or British there is much less agreement: see the results in Table 18.